"Fool!" he thought, "to think that she, who found it so easy a matter to deceive her husband, must needs be true to me. I was ill at ease and remorseful when I went to meet her; but she came to me smiling, and went away, placid and beautiful as a good angel, to tell her husband that she had been to Thurston's Crag, and had happened to meet Mr. Lansdell."
He stood as still as death, not betraying his presence by so much as the rustling of a leaf, while the two figures approached the spot above which he stood. But a little way off they paused, and were parting, very coolly, as it seemed, when Mrs. Gilbert lifted up her face, and said something to the man. He stood with his back turned towards Roland, to whom the very expression of Isabel's face was visible in the moonlight.
It seemed to him as if she was pleading for something, for he had never seen her face more earnest,—no, not even when she had decided the question of his life's happiness in that farewell meeting beneath Thurston's oak. She seemed to be pleading for something, since the man nodded his head once or twice while she was speaking, with a churlish gesture of assent; and when they were about to part he bent his head and kissed her. There was an insolent indifference about his manner of doing this that stung Roland more keenly than any display of emotion could have done.
After this the Doctor's Wife went away. Roland watched her as she turned once, and stood for a moment looking back at the man from whom she had just parted, and then disappeared amongst the shadows in the glade. Ah, if she had been nothing more than a shadow—if he could have awakened to find all this the brief agony of a dream! The man stood where Isabel had left him, while he took a box of fusees from his waistcoat-pocket and lighted a cigar; but his back was still turned to Mr. Lansdell.
He drew two or three puffs of smoke from the cigar, assured himself that it was fully lighted, and then strolled slowly towards the spot above which Roland stood.
All that was left of the original savage in the fine gentleman arose at that moment in Roland Lansdell's breast. He had come there, only to ascertain for himself that he had been betrayed and deluded; he had come with no vengeful purpose in his mind; or, at any rate, with no consciousness of any such purpose. He had come to be cool, indifferent, ironical; to slay with cruel and cutting words, perhaps, but to use no common weapons. But in a moment all his modern philosophy of indifference melted away, and left him with the original man's murderous instincts and burning sense of wrong raging fiercely in his breast.
He leapt down the sloping bank with scarcely any consciousness of touching the slippery grass; but he dragged the ferns and brambles from the loose earth in his descent, and a shower of torn verdure flew up into the summer air. He had no weapon, nothing but his right arm, wherewith to strike the broad-chested black-bearded stranger. But he never paused to consider that, or to count the chances of a struggle. He only knew that he wanted to kill the man for whose sake Isabel Gilbert had rejected and betrayed him. In the next moment his hands were on the stranger's throat.
"You scoundrel!" he gasped, hoarsely, "you consummate coward and scoundrel, to bring that woman to this place!"
There was a brief struggle, and then the stranger freed himself from Mr. Lansdell's grasp. There was no comparison between the physical strength and weight of the two men; and the inequality was sensibly increased by a stout walking-stick of the bludgeon order carried by the black-bearded stranger.
"Hoity-toity!" cried that gentleman, who seemed scarcely disposed to take Mr. Lansdell's attack seriously; "have you newly escaped from some local lunatic asylum, my friend, that you go about the country flying at people's throats in this fashion? What's the row? Can't a gentleman in the merchant navy take a moonlight stroll with his daughter for once in a way, to wish her good-bye before he fits out for a fresh voyage, without all this hullabaloo?"